Social Networking

So teens these days are all in the know about social networking, mainly the online social networking sites. Sites such as Myspace, Facebook, and most recently Twitter. But Twitter is the one that is most different from the others, since instead of directly linking two people, you just "follow" them. Twitter was defined as a micro-blogging site, where people just post random things as their "tweets" and then people could reply to them if they wanted. But what it is not is a place for people to start conversations. I absolutely hate people who start talking on twitter replies, it is the same as writing on facebook walls when you can just talk on msn, or your IM client. The difference is that on twitter, there are people from all over the world who are then able to "talk" to you. On facebook, I prefer to keep my friends to people I know, and people I would feel safe having access to my information. @replies on twitter have become increasing common for people to start an all out conversation, yet I do not think they are aware that most of the time, nobody cares. Direct Messages are there for a reason, so I implore you, please use them.

Another thing is FriendFeed. Most people will read this and be like "What is FriendFeed?" And maybe a handful will go and google FriendFeed to discover that it is a real-time feed aggregator. For those who don't know what that is, it is basically what Facebook is becoming. Except facebook sucks at it. Basically FriendFeed is able to link a whole lot of services together such as youtube, lastfm, various blogging tools, the list goes on to end at 58 services. So why am I talking about FriendFeed? Because most people are unaware of its capabilities, and then all of a sudden, everybody will be using it. FriendFeed is in a way, like Twitter, but it has real time commenting, so you are able to start a discussion in real time on FriendFeed. So instead of all those @replies on twitter, you can just comment on a feed, and then chat there. So I would say go check FriendFeed out, because it really is very interesting.